How do I clean up the output og this ?

habbardone

Hi,

I would like to display just the real text (words) from an imported page

I have used $text = strip_tags($data); to
clean up the text, but when I print out the
contents, I still get lots of garbage.

Is there a function that will take out non-character blocks from the string ?

E.g. to discard: "dg354srt" and "%uhr(66" , but keep "goats"

Or do I have to use a regex for that ?

Thanks

big_nerd

There is functions to remove non-char's, but not really non-words.

dg354srt is valid characters, and all letters could potentially be used in a sentence.

What I would do is take a look at your string and see if there is any kind of pattern that could be used against what you have.

You can do it if you want to remove any words that contain anything other than a specified set of characters, i.e. A-Z, a-z, ',", etc, in other words if the string was "happy dg354srt goats can eat %uhr(66 grass", you can remove "dg354srt" and "%uhr(66", since the other words only contain a-z.

see if you are able to clarify what kind of patterns you need to remove/save post it here.

habbardone

Well,
I don't need anything with numbers or other non-alphabetical characters
All I want is the words.

Is there any function for that ?

big_nerd

Is this what your looking for?

$string = "23320 98slkdj1239 0sd giant fKL flow88er hj32kuhSDFSDK Jh2380 u*Q@(&!(*&kajsdhfqk3jh4rqihcas sadkjhq23 8uwf 32iugh2f3";
$regex = "/[^A-Za-z ]*/";
echo preg_replace($regex,"",$string);

Outputs:

slkdj sd giant fKL flower hjkuhSDFSDK Jh uQkajsdhfqkjhrqihcas sadkjhq uwf iugh

habbardone

Yep,

I guess that is it 🙂

Thanks

Edit:

If the preg_replace is replacing the letters with "" i.e. nothing,
surely this should be doing the opposite of what I want,
or is there a negative in that expression somewhere ??

big_nerd

habbardone,

The preg_replace is replacing anything that is NOT A-Z, a-z, or a space " " with nothing, effectively removing it.

That ^ (shift 6 on my keyboard) means "NOT" in regex.

Note: To those who may correct me, if it doesn't mean not, sorry 🙂 but it does have that effect.